Every module on Atheron Progress carries one of four marks: shipped, building, next or later. Three of those marks describe intent. One of them describes a fact. This article is about that one.
The test
Shipped means somebody uses it today.
That is the whole rule. Not that the code is merged. Not that the tests pass. Not that we think it is finished. Somebody, right now, is using the thing to do something they wanted to do.
We chose this test because it is the only one we cannot argue our way around. A merged branch is a statement about the repository. A green test run is a statement about the tests. A person using the thing is a statement about the world, and the world does not care how close we felt we were.
What the test rules out
The rule is short, so most of its value is in what it refuses.
- Code that is written but nobody runs is not shipped. It is building.
- A feature that works on our machines and nowhere else is not shipped. It is building.
- A service that is deployed but has no user yet is not shipped. It is building, however finished it looks.
- A demo we showed once is not shipped. If nobody came back to it, nobody uses it today.
Today is doing real work in that sentence. Something that was used last month and is now broken or abandoned does not keep its mark. If the status page shows a public service down, the modules that depend on it are not quietly left as shipped while we fix it. The record is meant to tell you what is true now.
Why the percentages depend on this
The percentage shown against each project is counted from the module marks. We never type a number in. So the percentage is only as honest as the marks underneath it, and the shipped mark is the one that carries the weight.
If we let a nearly finished module slip into shipped, the figure would go up and mean less. Do that a few times and the whole page becomes a mood rather than a measurement. Keeping the test strict is how we keep the number worth reading.
The other three marks
The rest of the marks are easier, because they are about plans and plans are ours to make.
Table: What each mark on Atheron Progress means
| Mark | What it says |
|---|---|
| Shipped | Somebody uses it today |
| Building | We are working on it now and nobody uses it yet |
| Next | It is the next thing we intend to build |
| Later | It is on the list, with no date |
You will notice there is no mark for done but unused. That gap is deliberate. Work that sits between building and shipped is the work most likely to be oversold, so we give it nowhere to hide. It stays building until the test is met.
How this applies across the projects
The same rule runs through everything on the tracker, and it is why some projects look the way they do.
Atheron Trading runs on paper only until launch. Modules there can be shipped in the sense that we use them today, on paper, but you will not see performance figures, because there are none to report.
ATON Desk is marked coming soon. That means nobody uses it today, so nothing in it is shipped, whatever state the code is in.
Atheron Network Labs is open for projects. Open is a fact about today, which is why we can say it.
ATON Blockchain follows the same split as the rest. Read the module marks, not the project name, to see what is in use.
What you can check
We do not ask you to take the shipped mark on trust. The changelog records when something crossed the line. The status page shows ninety days of history for each public service, each day coloured by its worst event. If a module is marked shipped and the service behind it has been down for a week, you can see the contradiction, and so can we.
Shipped is a claim about use, and use is the one thing we cannot fake from inside a repository.
If you ever find a module marked shipped that nobody could be using, that is a bug in the record and we want to know. The mark is only useful while it is strict.
Shawn Wilson, Founder and CEO
